Chapter 1
Dangerous Encounter
Denali National Park
August 31
Kara's in danger, thought Mike Nakano.
Apparently unaware of the threat lurking straight ahead of her, his friend and fellow smokejumper Kara Latrans was hiking straight towards a disastrous encounter.
Kara was a coyote shifter, stronger than any Ordinary human. But Mike knew that even in her beast form, she was no match for a grizzly bear with a pair of cubs to protect.
He had to warn her before disaster struck. And protect her.
Somewhere up ahead, a bear roared angrily, followed by the sound of Kara's voice, uneven with nerves.
His heart pounding with a sudden surge of adrenaline, Mike Nakano dropped his huge, heavy backpack. Fumbling with haste, he unlaced and yanked off his sturdy logger boots.
Then he called up his bear half and launched into an all-out run through the dense forest. His feet made no sound on the thick, springy carpet of fallen spruce needles carpeting the forest floor.
"Kara!" he shouted, hoping she could hear him over the mile that separated them, especially with the sound-absorbing soft earth and decaying vegetable matter all around them. "Stop! Bear!"
As he sprinted towards her, still shouting warnings and desperately trying to close the distance before disaster struck, he let his beast form roll over him.
His shouted warnings changed to inhuman roars as he shifted.
Forcing a shape-change like this hurt like hell, and he was moving blindly now. He'd never tried to shift so fast, or do it while running.
He hoped either that the sound of his approach would frighten off the mother bear or that he would complete his shift in time to intercept an attack before Kara was hurt or killed.
Rage poured through him at the thought of anything happening to her.
Mike frantically tried to force his shift to go faster. Then he stumbled and crashed face-first into the ground as his bones and joints rearranged themselves into those of his beast form.
Precious seconds sped by as he writhed in agony through the final stages of his shift.
When it was complete, he rose shakily to four paws. Blurry trees and bushes spun and wavered as he blinked furiously, trying to clear his vision of the aftereffects of his rapid shift.
He swung his muzzle around, tracking Kara's deliciously appealing scent, which now bore the tang of stress and fear. She must have finally either heard his warning or spotted the bears herself.
Shit! His aching muscles bunched as he began running again, this time in a lumbering, four-footed gallop.
Mike had been tailing Kara for most of the morning. It had crossed his mind that he was being weird and kind of creepy-stalkerish, but he couldn't help himself. His inner bear demanded that he guard her against the many dangers present in this wilderness.
It would have been easier if he'd simply asked Kara if she wanted a hiking buddy for the long walk out from the Alaska backcountry where the Rocky Mountain Smokejumpers had been deployed to help fight a massive fire.
Hell, given the safety lecture they'd received back in Fairbanks from a State Fish & Game wildlife biologist, not to mention the stories told by their former teammate and Alaska native Carl Jensen, most of the Ordinary smokejumpers had elected to hike out in groups of three and four.
But when it came to Kara, Mike somehow always turned into a chickenshit. It hadn't helped that his shifter teammates had all decided to stick to their usual routine of doing solitary pack-outs, which removed the convenient excuse that Mike had planned to use for proposing that he and Kara team up.
So he'd choked. Again. Like a fricking coward.
Why was it that he never thought twice about jumping out of planes and fighting fires in the wilderness, but the prospect of asking Kara if he could spend time with her—to court her, his bear reminded him—made everything inside of him freeze up?
He huffed in self-disgust and pushed himself to run even more swiftly.
Before he had smelled the bears a couple of minutes ago, he'd been debating how to reveal himself and inform Kara that she had been walking in the wrong direction for the past couple of hours.
The Rocky Mountain Smokejumpers were one of several smokejumper teams deployed to central Alaska to help the Alaska Smokejumpers battle a huge wildfire raging in the vast expanse of Denali National Park in central Alaska.
Smokejumpers were an elite group of firefighters, trained to parachute into the most inhospitable wilderness areas and endure grueling physical challenges while fighting wildfires armed only with chainsaws, shovels, and hand tools.
With only one road leading in and out of the park, they had been critical in reaching the remote location of this fire.
Once the fire had been extinguished or controlled, the smokejumpers would pack up all their equipment. Heavily loaded, they were expected to "pack-out" in an arduous hike to a rendezvous point for pickup and transport back to base.
Everything that had come with them needed to go back with them, since all firefighters in national parks operated under the guideline for Minimum Impact Suppression Techniques, or MIST.
Though helicopter flights were restricted within wilderness boundaries, the authorities had made an exception in this case, because of the exceptionally rugged conditions in Denali.
A helitack crew had dropped cargo nets to carry out the majority of the smokejumpers' heavy equipment—chainsaws, cubies of drinking water, bundles of spare tools, and all the trash generated during nearly two weeks of intensive effort.
Mike and his teammates had kept their sleeping bags, hand tools, and the small amount of food they had left. They had jumped to the McKinley Fire with three days' worth of food and water, which had been supplemented by an air drop of additional rations and cubies of water.
Now, ten days later, the fire was finally out, and most of the food was gone.
With the satisfaction of another fire successfully knocked down, Mike and his teammates had begun their pack-out.
At their final incident briefing, his former teammate Carl Jensen, who was working for the Alaska Smokejumpers this fire season, had warned all the smokejumpers that this pack-out would be exceptionally long and strenuous. For starters, it was a two-and-a-half-day hike from the fire's location to their pickup point along Denali Park Road.
He had cautioned all the smokejumpers to carry bear spray and to make sure that they knew how to use it.
He had also warned them to run like hell from moose—which he described as "the most dangerous animals in Alaska"—but never to run from a wolf or bear. This was something that all the shifters present knew, since their beast halves were predators of various kinds, but Ordinaries needed to be reminded not to act like prey items when confronted with wild predators.